wearable

Would you be happy for other people to know that you were feeling vulnerable?

Or that you were feeling angry, or hungry or tired?

I have been reading up on wearable technologies lately, and one of the things that strikes me is that of many people a big deal for other people to know just how we’re feeling. It’s an issue of privacy.

Many wearables rely on interpreting, almost in real-time, physiological changes which indicate that a person is experiencing a particular emotion.

The wearer sets them manually, they do not ‘read’ data directly from elsewhere

My hope is that people would use a variety of different tools to help inform their choice of Care Label at any particular point. This could include tools like mood-tracker MoodScope, or any of the other types of applications experimented with by people involved in the Quantified Self movement.

Depending on how much data you wish to collect about yourself you could track your nutrition, exercise, sleep, mood, heart-rate, blood pressure – whatever you believe can help inform you about what your needs are at any given moment.

You could adjust your Care Labels as often or as rarely as you wished, and, importantly, take them off if you really feel that they will really give away too much about you.

How happy would you be to wear Care Labels? Are there any Care Labels that you would not want other people to see you wearing?

My watch is not a smart watch, but looks pretty cool with its built-in calculator.

BBC News Technology journalist and Click presenter Alex Hudson has been somewhat prolific of late. I know this because I have him in my Circles in Google+ – a space which I am still experimenting with.

He cites Knight Rider as the main cultural reference for children of the 1970s / 80s like me, in which tech-forward car Kit is controlled by David Hasselhoff speaking into a futuristic watch.

This is not the case for me, as it was a commercial featuring one-time Doctor Who star Peter Davison and his showbiz wife Angie Dickinson trying to flog some saucepans with a ‘lifetime guarantee’.

To date I have been unable to find a high quality clip of this advertisement, but here’s a slightly ropey one so you get the general idea.

The upshot of Alex’s article is that tech is just not quite there for smartwatches. While the big players like Casio, Samsung and (possibly) Apple continue to tinker, smaller start-ups like Pebble are getting in the act by crowd-sourcing their projects.

Why am I interested in this?

In imagining wearable ‘care labels’ I have focused on highly visible designs which could be worn, for example, as badges in the ‘Star Trek communicator’ style – read my first thoughts here and additional thoughts about a possible role in my project for mobile devices here.

A wristwatch could be another location where care labels could be displayed. Possibly in a more discreet way, giving the wearer a greater amount of choice about who sees the labels and who doesn’t.

In addition to this, one of the main advantages of smartwatches is considered to be near-field communication. It’s interesting to contemplate a world where not only could we communicate our daily care labels but pick up those of other people within range.

Last week Mashable reported that Twitter had gathered data about key words used in tweets which indicated the moods and behaviour of people on each day of the week for each month of the year.

Essentially they have aggregated the frequency of the following terms:

“feel happy”

“feel sad”

“hungover”

“late for work”

So, what did this reveal?

The most interesting finding to me is that December is a month of highs and lows. While Tuesdays in December often attract “feel happy” tweets, this is the month of the year when users are most likely to use the term “feel sad” in their update.

Why am I interested in this?

Part of the ‘Cheer up love’ care labels project which I have not really explored here is exchanging data from mobile apps with a wearable item like the care labels I have talked about.

So it could be possible that setting the wearable would add a ‘signature’ to your texts, emails or social media updates. This might be the combination that you have set the wearable to that day.

But taking it further, could the wearable item receive data from your texts, emails, social media updates or other quantified self apps or devices which would prompt the wearer to adjust their labels?

I’ve spoken before about using a mood tracking program such as MoodScope to recommend care labels for that day. MoodScope currently only records one mood score per day – but other apps could continue to inform your choice of wearable care labels on a much more regular basis.

I’d like to thank my good friend Phil Bradley for a few thought grenades he’s bunged in my general direction lately.

Most recently he sent me YouTube video by a guy called Alex Day who has started a Tumblr site called Lifescouts. He loves badges and didn’t see why earning them for various challenges shouldn’t continue beyond the world of scouting.

Alex has devised a series of enamel badges which can be earned for a range of activities listed on the Tumblr site. So not only can people wear and share their badges face-to-face but add notes on their experience of each achievement to the Tumblr site.

Well, it’s about sparking face-to-face conversations around personal experiences by using a wearable item that might tell you something about that person you didn’t already know.

Wearing symbols, whether they reflect your achievements (Lifescouts) or your needs (Cheer up love care labels), acts as an invitation to other people to connect with you – even if they’ve never done so before. The physical, wearable object says ‘I am open to having a discussion about this’.